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Border walls aim to keep out migrants, but also threaten bears, deer, other wildlife

Eastern European countries have built hundreds of miles of border fences to clamp down on migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, but scientists say these barriers pose a threat to the region's wildlife.
Especially vulnerable are migrating bear, deer, lynx and wolf populations.

ZAGREB, Croatia — Eastern European countries have built hundreds of miles of border fences to clamp down on migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, but scientists say these barriers pose a threat to the region's wildlife.

John Linnell, an ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, said it is hard to determine the long-term impact on these animals, but restricted access to food needed as seasons change could lead to higher mortality and reduced population sizes.

"The European landscape is very fragmented from a wildlife point of view. We have all these highways, railroads and urban areas that sit quite close together. The walls are one more thing that come on top of all that," Linnell said.

A border fence separates Slovenia and Croatia, seen from the Slovenian side, on April 10, 2018.(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)

In Europe, the survival of some wolf populations are seriously threatened because the fences prevent them from ranging across both sides of the Slovenia-Croatia border in search of mating partners, according to recent research by Huber, Linnell and a dozen other Eastern European wildlife experts.

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Border walls may seem to draw clear lines, but they can have unintentional consequences, as USA TODAY's Kim Hjelmgaard shows us in Europe.
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Their research paper, published in the academic journal PLOS Biology, said that out of 10 or 11 wolf packs currently in Slovenia, five live on both sides of the Slovenia-Croatia border. If newly built walls prevent them from roaming, they would have reduced access to a varied gene pool and "face rapid inbreeding" that could harm their survival.

But the Dinaric lynx, named for the Dinarides mountain range that stretches from Italy to Albania, may have an even tougher ride.

The medium-sized cat nearly went extinct at the end of the 19th century from overhunting and because its habitat was divided into ever smaller patches. It was reintroduced in Slovenia and Croatia in the 1970s but remains endangered.

The study's authors noted that the construction of fences could be the last push for the Dinaric lynx population to again "spiral down the extinction vortex."